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Henry Hill (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Former mobster Henry Hill died last night at the age of 69, and I must say I’m surprised: knowing him a bit, it’s miraculous that he made it this long. His life story was the basis of the movie Goodfellas, as depicted by Ray Liotta and brilliantly told by Martin Scorsese, and anyone who’s ever seen the flick has to admire a) how he managed to avoid getting whacked while in the mob b) how he managed to avoid getting whacked while in the Witness Protect Program and c) how he managed to avoid getting whacked after getting kicked out of the Witness Protection Program.

Given all this impressive dodging, I take some small pride in the following statement: I whacked Henry Hill.

Some background: About a decade ago, I cofounded a true crime magazine called Justice. The basic idea was that we could take a genre that worked tremendously on daytime TV (Judge Judy, People’s Court and about a dozen copycats a the time), primetime TV ( a dozen variants of Law and Order and CSI), books (John Grisham, Scott Turow and a million others), etc. and translate that into a magazine that would fly off supermarket checkouts. I recruited Nancy Grace and Marcia Clark and all sorts of other legal luminaries. And as our mafia correspondent, I reached out to Henry Hill, who presumably knew both the cops and the goodfellas. The wiseguy who ratted out fifty members of the Lucchese family would now cover his old chums.

Having been booted from Witness Protection, in part due to cocaine addition and conspiring to deal drugs, Henry was out on his own and understandably a bit paranoid about who he dealt with. Contacting him required the kind of elaborate smoke signaling lost to North America two centuries ago. I would pass word through an intermediary that I wanted to talk, and then at random times that generally coincided with waking me up, some mysterious third party would call from a blocked number, and then patch in Henry.

We hit it off, mostly bonding over our shared love of food. He had been a chef in his post-mob days, and was working on a cookbook; I reviewed restaurants as a hobby. In a gravelly Brooklyn accent that came across like an agitated mumble, Henry began steering me to the places where the wiseguys ate, including Vincent’s in Little Italy, and Don Peppe’s near Kennedy Airport (“call it Don Pep’s, or they’ll know you don’t belong”), where the predominantly male patrons really did wear tracksuits and the wine came home-brewed from the owner’s garage.

It became hard to get him off the phone: Do-it-yourself witness protection can apparently be a lonely place. He would regale me with stories about the infamous Lufthansa Airlines heist in 1978, the largest cash robbery ($5 million) ever on American soil. “Anything that came through JFK, we could take a piece,” he told me, adding, “We lived liked kings.”

By the time I knew him, though, he was a king no more. He was desperate for money. Henry actually signed on in Justice’s primordial days, before we even had a fleshed-out business plan. Since his $3,000 per column salary would only commence once we began publishing, he had helped me pass the hat from day one. I cohosted one dinner for prospective investors at Sparks, a Manhattan steakhouse infamous as the spot where John “The Dapper Don” Gotti rubbed out his predecessor, “Big Paul” Castellano. Henry finished our PowerPoint presentation with an offer they couldn’t refuse. “Hi, this is Henry Hill,” his prerecorded message announced menacingly, as a still from Goodfellas flashed on the screen. “I heard you’re all eating at Sparks. A few years back, something bad happened to a friend of mine there. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you, so I suggest you fork over the money.” The whole group laughed -- nervously.

We eventually got it forked over, but by the time we were ready to launch, he had devolved back into addict mode. He moved from Washington State to Nebraska, and began calling me wantonly, his number carelessly popping into my phone, his slurred voice bemoaning his fate and occasionally cursing me out, over what I never knew since half his words were undecipherable. He was busted around that time for meth. Contribute even scraps of commentary about current mob cases (we always planned to have someone ghostwrite)? Fugghetaboutit.

There was no choice: I had to whack him. I replaced Henry with another mafiaso made famous by Hollywood, Joe Pistone, better known as “Donnie Brasco.” Ray Liotta for Johnny Depp? Seemed like an upgrade. Pistone was sharp—when we had lunch, he would only sit at the corner seat of a corner table, so that no one could come at him from behind. And he was sober.

But Henry had clearly put some kind of Sicilian curse on us. Readers may have dug the true crime fare, but advertisers proved leery of Justice’s sordid content. The magazine was gone within a year. And now so is Henry.